Brenda Zlamany is an American artist best known for portraiture that combines Old Master technique with a postmodern conceptual approach.Schwabsky, Barry. "Brenda Zlamany / E. M. Donahue Gallery," Artforum, February 1993, p. 99–100. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Cotter, Holland. "'Everything Is Real' at Jessica Fredericks Gallery," The New York Times, August 9, 1996, p. C23. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Kuspit, Donald. The End of Art, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005, p. 183.Rose, Joshua. "Brenda Zlamany: The Art of Seeing," American Art Collector, April 2007, p. 140. She gained attention beginning in the 1990s, when critics such as Artforum's Barry Schwabsky, Donald Kuspit and John Yau identified her among a small group of figurative painters reviving the neglected legacies of portraiture and classical technique by introducing confrontational subject matter, psychological insight and social critique.Cirincione, Janine. "Brenda Zlamany at E. M. Donahue," Cover, March 1991, p. 17.Ebony, David. "Brenda Zlamany at E. M. Donahue," Art in America February 1993, p. 110.Schwabsky, Barry. "Catherine Howe," Artforum, February 1996, p. 84.Yau, John. Brenda Zlamany, New York and Los Angeles: Stefan Stux and Muse X, 1998. Her early portraits of well-known male artists, such as Chuck Close and Leon Golub, reversed conventional artist/sitter gender and power dynamics;Morgan, Robert C. "Individual Issues: Bald Guys, Dead Birds…" Cover, October 1994, p. 38.Melrod, George. "Openings (Review)," Art & Antiques, October 1996, p. 30.Wei, Lilly. "The Great American (Male) Nude," ARTnews, December 2010, p. 82–5. her later projects upend the traditionally "heroic" nature of portraiture by featuring underrepresented groups and everyday people.Luce, Jim. "American Mother-Daughter Duo Sketch 888 Taiwanese Faces," Huffington Post, July 3, 2012. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Cohen, David. "Brenda Zlamany at the Derfner Judaica Museum, Bronx," Art Critical, October 17, 2017. Retrieved September 27, 2019.
Zlamany has exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, National Museum, Gdańsk, and New-York Historical Society.Hickey, Dave. "The Lost World," Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Exhibition 2006, Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ University of Washington Press, 2006, p. 15, 76.Shu, Catherine. "Simultaneous Interpretation," Taipei Times, February 22, 2012.Kuspit, Donald. New Old Masters/Nowi Dawni Mistrzowie, Gdansk: National Museum in Gdansk, p. 92–6. 2007. Her work has been recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and commissions from Yale University, World Bank and The New York Times Magazine, among others;Stein, Sarah. "First Female Ph.D.s Memorialized," Yale Daily News, April 6, 2016. Retrieved September 27, 2019.U.S. Department of State. "Brenda Zlamany," Fulbright Scholar List. Retrieved September 27, 2019.Pollock-Krasner Foundation. "Brenda Zlamany," Artists. Retrieved September 27, 2019. it belongs to public collections such as the Neuberger Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. "Brenda Zlamany," Collections. Retrieved September 27, 2019. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.Gellman, Lucy. "Brenda Zlamany Comes Home," Arts Paper, January 8, 2019. Retrieved October 30, 2019.
Early life and career Brenda Zlamany was born in 1959 in New York City and raised in Queens, New York. After a family move to Connecticut, she applied to and was accepted into the Educational Center for the Arts, an arts high school in New Haven; she attended from 1974 to 1977, living on her own in various informal arrangements. During that time, she worked for a city program painting murals, illustrated a children's book,Garskof, Bert. The Canbe Collective Builds a Be-hive, Dandelion Press, 1977. Retrieved October 30, 2019. and was invited to attend the Yale College Before College Program, where she studied printmaking, painting and anthropology.Castellanos-Monfil, Román. "Portrait of Yale's First Seven Women Ph.D.’s Unveiled," Yale News April 6, 2016. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Following high school, she studied at Wesleyan University (BA, 1981), the Tyler School of Art in Rome, S. W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.McGill, Douglas C. "Personal Art and the Skowhegan Experience," The New York Times, September 2, 1984, Sect. 2, p. 6. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
In 1984, Zlamany took advantage of a Jerome Foundation Fellowship and moved to New York City, working as a master printer with artists such as Julian Schnabel, Vija Celmins and Sol LeWitt, and making etchings at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.The New Yorker. "Brenda Zlamany," The New Yorker , November 30, 1992, p. 26. After moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she began painting and attracting attention with animal still lifes.Kozik, K. K. "Heavy Meditations," Cover, April 1993, p. 14. Between 1984 and 1994, she was featured in solo exhibitions at Hallwalls and E. M. Donahue Gallery (New York), Sabine Wachters Fine Arts (Brussels) and Galerie Quintessens (Utrecht),Devolder, Eddy. "Brenda Zlamany: Une histoire presque sans histoires," Avancées, November 1993, p. 31.Stadsblad. "Eigenzinnige Diertaferelen Brenda Zlamany in Quintessens," Stadsblad, March 30, 1993. in group shows at White Columns, Art in General and Artists Space, and alongside artists including Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol, in shows at Jack Tilton and Blum Helman.McGovern, Adam. "Detritus," Cover, September 1990, p. 17.Stein, Deidre. "Bestiary / Blum Helman," ARTnews, December 1993, p. 133. In subsequent years, Zlamany has had solo exhibitions at the StuxMaxwell Douglas F. "Brenda Zlamany at Stux Gallery," Review, December 1, 1998, p. 16–17. and Jessica Fredericks galleries (New York), the Fine Arts Center (UMass) (2001)Yau, John. "Double Portraits of Two Portraits," Brenda Zlamany: Color Study, Amherst, MA: Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, 2002. Retrieved September 27, 2019. and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2012), and appeared in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, National Portrait Gallery, and several European museums.Késenne, Joannes. Het oorkussen van de Melancholie (catalogue), Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2000, p. 42.Ebony, David. "David Ebony's Top 10 Most Memorable Artworks of 2015," Artnet, December 23, 2015. Retrieved October 2, 2019. She continues to live in Williamsburg with her daughter, Oona.
Work and reception Critics note Zlamany's portraiture for its conceptual slant, postmodern interrogations of the male gaze, traditional subject matter, beauty and representation, and Old Master technique. John Yau and others connect her work, in sensibility if not style, back to figurative modernists such as Alice Neel, Otto Dix and Ivan Albright, contemporary painters like Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Gregory Gillespie and Alex Katz that integrate elements of abstraction into representational work, and postmodern artists such as John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Lisa Yuskavage who have ushered in new, critical and democratic forms of portraiture in recent decades.Finkelstein, Alix. "New Directions in Children's Portraiture," Fine Art Connoisseur, November–December 2009, p. 39–42.Grant, Daniel. "The Modern Portrait: Is It Worth the Price to Get Yourself Painted?" Observer, May 9, 2018. Distinguishing her from artists that appropriate or parody classical technique, Donald Kuspit placed Zlamany amid a tendency he called "new Old Masterism" that sought "to restore the beauty lost to avant-garde innovation."Kuspit, Donald. "Going, Going, Gone," Artnet, September 16, 1999. Retrieved September 27, 2019. Other reviewers, such as The New York Times''' Holland Cotter, have invoked painters such as Rembrandt, Zurbarán and Chardin in describing Zlamany's handling of color, surface and paint application.Cohen, Mark Daniel. "Brenda Zlamany at Stux Gallery," Review, December 1, 1998, p. 14–16.
Early animal still lifes Zlamany first attracted notice for meticulously rendered paintings of animal carcasses (birds, blowfish, snakes, sharks, iguanas), isolated and floating ambiguously in dark, painterly abstract fields (e.g., Shark Head #2, 1992). She began this work in the mid-1980s as a way to connect to visceral experience and elements of art practice—painting, craft, beauty—that she felt women were discouraged from pursuing. Reviewers noted her mastery of academic glazing techniques, delicate sense of color and texture, and paint application suggestive of both Old Master and Abstract Expressionist technique;The New Yorker. "Brenda Zlamany," The New Yorker , December 21, 1998, p. 16, 18. in psychological terms, they described the paintings as "disquietingly seductive,"Condon, Elisabeth. "Small, Really Small, Tiny," New Art Examiner, March 1993, p. 32–3. vaguely allegorical, icon-like contemplations of life, death, desire and spirituality.Sweet, Christopher. Fallen Idylls: American Figurative Painting, New York: P.P.O.W., 1994.Ebony, David. "Brenda Zlamany at Jessica Fredericks," Artnet, November 20, 1996.Hewett, Heather. "In Memory of Pleasure: John Michael Kohler Arts Center," Art Papers, September–October 1997, p. 74.Heisler, Eva. "'New York Noir' / Allez les Filles," Dialogue, May–June 1995, p. 22. Janine Cirincione wrote that they "teeter on the edge of abstraction and representation, old master bravura and postmodern theory, between the seductive and the gruesome," with freewheeling art historical borrowings that challenged both traditional pictorial values and contemporary negations of representational work. Barry Schwabsky likewise noted the work's conceptual preference for investigating materiality and illusionism and art's "half-feared, half-desired" fascination with representation and beauty over realism. In a later series, Zlamany painted posed, live snakes that emphasized linear decoration, pattern and male sexuality while subverting traditional cultural associations of snakes with the feminine.
Portraiture In 1992, Zlamany painted her first human portrait and exhibited it alongside animal still lifes, interested in how the out-of-fashion genre would be received. Positive response inspired her 1994 show, "Twelve Men and Twelve Birds," a deadpan pairing of dead bird and artist portraits (including Chuck Close, Glenn Ligon, Gary Stephan).Gilsoul, Guy. "Une portraitiste d’aujourd’hui," Le vif / L’express, March 31, 1995, p. 89. Writers described them as terse, moody, glowing likenesses that emerged from velvety black, reflective backgrounds and emphasized composition, surface and volume rather than personality or photographic reproduction.The New Yorker. "Brenda Zlamany," The New Yorker , October 17, 1994, p. 29.Levin, Kim. "Brenda Zlamany, Voice Choices," Village Voice, September 27, 1994.Herfield, Phyllis. "Brenda Zlamany: / E.M. Donahue," The New York Review of Art, December 1994, p. 21.Devolder, Eddy. "Brenda Zlamany at Sabine Wachters," Flash Art, October 1995, p. 121. Her 1995 show at Sabine Wachters featured portraits of the gallery's other artists—generally middle-aged, bald, male conceptual artists—that Guy Gilsoul called meticulously painted, inaccessible "mixtures of attraction, and repulsion, fascination and aversion." In conceptual terms, critics such as Robert C. Morgan deemed this work a provocative deconstruction that coaxed "exemplars of art world virility" into a passive role in order to glimpse male reality and sexual and power dynamics, reversing centuries of objectification of female subjects.Pozzi Lucio. "Che ve ne sembra dell’ America? Lettera da New York di Lucio Pozzi. L’artista e il suo doppio," Il giornale dell’arte, December 1994. John Yau described them as possessing a "disturbing eroticism" sealed off in dark anonymous space and embalming glazes that dissolved the subjects' power.